Sometimes I find that my patients with tailbone pain (coccyx pain, coccydynia) actually have a mass, cyst, tumor, or cancer either within the tailbone itself or in the nearby tissues. Examples can include pilonidal cyst, retro-rectal hamartoma (tailgut cyst), chordoma (a type of bone cancer that tends to happen at the coccyx and is […]

When there is skin breakdown of ulceration of the skin over the coccyx, it is worth looking for a cause. Sometimes people develop a bed-sore of the skin behind the sacrum and coccyx after spending too much time laying in bed. (The medical term for a bedsore is a “decubitus ulcer”.) Usually, a bedsore […]

A “bone scan” is a test performed by the nuclear medicine part of a radiology center.

The nuclear medicine bone scan is generally considered to be very good for detecting bone destruction from things like bone cancer (malignancy), bone infection (osteomyelitis), or bone injuries (such as fractures).

Surgical removal of the tailbone (coccyx) is medically known as coccygectomy.

In the United States the coccygectomy surgery would often be considered an outpatient surgery, meaning that you have the surgery in the morning and go home by that evening. But that may vary depending on how someone is doing in the recovery area after […]